For a while now, those of us who provide Cloud services have been saying that a properly run Cloud environment is inherently more secure than traditional on-premise IT environments.

Now a recent study from Alert Logic backs up that claim. The study compared security in traditional on-premise and service-provider-managed environments of 1,500 organizations with active investment in IT security.

Reading a service-level agreement (SLA) may be as exciting as watching paint dry — but when it comes to creating a hybrid that fits your organization and truly meets its needs, bringing your full attention to your SLA can make all the difference.

Expect to customize your hybrid cloud SLA. The whole point of a private cloud is to design and customize cloud capabilities to address your unique needs, and you need a Cloud services provider willing and able to do that in ways that precisely reflect your business requirements so you can achieve the flexibility, scalability, cost reductions, efficiencies, redundancy, and disaster recovery protections you need — without overspending on overcapacity.

As you spend more and more time using Cloud-delivered services, applications, and data, odds are you’ll end up interested in a hybrid Cloud environment that can be deployed in ways that quite specifically meet your organization’s needs, both business-wise and budget-wise.

If your experience has been limited to public Clouds, you’ll need to tread carefully into the realm of hybrids because, by definition, hybrid Clouds are customized. Very quickly, you’ll come to understand that the success of your hybrid Cloud greatly depends on its customizer.

A recent report by Forrester Consulting suggests your web applications may be far more vulnerable than you think. According to Forrester, 51% of the 240 North American and European companies surveyed experienced at least one application security incident since the beginning of 2011. And 18% of those suffered losses of at least $500,000. For 8% of those surveyed, losses topped $1 million.

The majority of developers are not security experts, and secure coding is historically not identified as a priority. Oftentimes, the arduous task of vulnerability identification and remediation cannot be successfully addressed by limited IT security resources.

Look for an app development services provider who offers a time-saving solution for all types of security testing — outsourced, individual, and enterprise-wide analysis — and for all types of users, including application developers, build managers, Quality Assurance (QA) teams, penetration testers, security auditors, and senior management.

Late last year, market researcher IDC reported that by 2015 more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices. Judging by the eager embrace of smartphone and tablets since then, I’d guess their prediction may be conservative.

And unquestionably, this kind of mobility in business is a game-changer both in terms of how we do business and how we do information security.

Cloud computing gets immense attention these days as a profound agent of change affecting how IT serves the business. In particular, Cloud computing has begun the untethering of employees from their desks and their offices. Because the mobility of today’s, and tomorrow’s workforce cannot happen without the Cloud.

Yet worries about Cloud security abound, and for good reason: Cloud computing that involves processing sensitive or regulated data in shared environments needs extra scrutiny in terms of security (as well as codifying requirements, defining a cloud services contract, managing the transition from in-house to cloud, and overseeing the resulting mixed IT environment).

Odds are your IT environment is somehow engaged in virtualization — either directly in your data center or indirectly via the service providers you’ve engaged.

But how much have you — or your IT people — thought about virtualization security? This matters more than you may think. One Gartner analyst has estimated that 60% of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they’ve replaced.